Lynn Basa

Lynn Basa grew up in the country outside of Bloomington, Indiana and has been creating art since the age of six. Lynn began her formal art training working with ceramics in the seventh grade. She credits a middle school teacher with cultivating her inner artist during this time. Basa continued studying ceramics throughout her high school career and eventually majored in Ceramics at Indiana University. Shortly after graduation, Basa moved to Seattle where she began a 22-year-long career as a curator. This allowed her to learn the business side of art while she developed her own portfolio of artwork.

As a teenager, Basa began exploring clay and fiber, creating textiles that resembled paintings. These interests lead her into the arena of public art where she could express herself in a much wider array of materials including glass mosaic, terrazzo, and metal. Around 2000, Lynn focused her creativity singularly on painting. Her influences include organic, natural forms or accidental textures and shapes. She strives to capture the force of nature in her encaustic paintings. Basa asserts that there is a quality to her work that "is so rooted in naturally-occurring forms that anyone who has ever been fascinated by geological strata, the complex beauty of a rust stain, or the random arrangement of raindrops on a window pane" will respond to her work.

Lynn now lives in Chicago where she is a professor of Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, and is a published author.